The drifting, the disenfranchised and the down-and-out, all looking for the "one sweet moment" and refusing to acknowledge the ruin to follow, are denizens of Ann Cummins' startlingly original first collection of stories, "Red Ant House." Set amid an almost mythically depressed landscape of the American Southwest, replete with reservations and uranium mills, her stories take place in a realm of endless deserts, bleached skies and desperate dreamers.

The recipient of a Lannan fellowship, Cummins has re-created the world she grew up in, where families, lovers and cultures all rub one another the wrong way -- and she's rendered it in brilliantly imagined prose that boasts surprises like small electric shocks.

Billed as a combination Denis Johnson and Flannery O'Connor, Cummins is no literary hybrid. She may write about culture clash the way O'Connor does, but her humor is less wry and more potent. Like Johnson, her characters are downtrodden, but they can't stop themselves from grabbing at hope.

This is a world where people are so marginalized, they struggle with invisibility, using their secrets to gain -- and possibly keep -- toeholds. In the wonderful title story, "Red Ant House," young Leigh is repeatedly told that her sweetness left her the day she learned to speak. And indeed, she's no innocent. She befriends Theresa, the most pathetic kid on the block, then turns around and reveals -- with disastrous results -- that Theresa's "father" has a wife on the other side of town. Hoping to make amends, Leigh suggests that she and Theresa expose themselves to the neighborhood pervert for money, and when that backfires, Leigh persists, sure that being back on top is just a scheme away, like "a dream in the distance."

The secrets in "Trapeze" are even more ominous. Another young girl, Karen, friendless, unnoticed, "a little pill" who has to raise her hand to speak in her own family, is one of the few whites going to school on the increasingly violent reservation. She's terrorized by an Indian girl, Purple, so named for the sweater she refuses to remove. Purple taunts Karen, endangers her at gym and steals a valuable ring from the Mormon shop where Karen works, daring Karen to tell. But Karen feels that some uneasy covenant has been made, she's drawn to Purple's outrageous presence as much as she fears it, and even after another, more damaging secret of Purple's is revealed, Karen stays quiet, because in this world, any connection is worth something.

Families fracture here. No center holds. In "Starbust," a cop wonders whether he won his kleptomaniac wife because he stole her note meant for his friend, and to prove to himself that he's bonded to her, he does the one thing he's been trying to keep her from doing herself. In "Blue Fly," the makeshift family of an orphaned brother and sister becomes a push-pull dance of frantic longing and need, tearing as easily as the stitches in a dress. In Cummins' capable hands, nothing's what you might expect, even the structure of a story like "Crazy Yellow." Here, young Pete's left to his own devices when his sick mother is in the hospital and his baby-sitter doesn't show. What starts as a "home alone" tale veers into the perilous when Pete finds himself at the mercy of a squatter, who, like Pete, is "not in control of his circumstances."

Part of the pleasure of this collection is the way Cummins pushes the boundaries of language, transforming the mundane into something strikingly new.

A boy is "a little thumbprint in his mother's fist." A white girl on the reservation is nothing but "a little puff of kitten fur." The snap and crackle of Cummins' prose begins to feel like revelation.

If there's any fault line in this collection, it's that some of the stories seem unfinished, as if they need what Cummins calls in her acknowledgments "the story below the story."

"Where I Work," told in the voice of a girl struggling to keep her nightmare job, is too on-the-surface, without any deeper meaning. In "The Hypnotist's Trailer," a mesmerist turns a session with an alcoholic mother and her nubile daughter into a surreally sexual encounter. He informs the mother that she's drinking because her center -- her belly button -- isn't strong enough to hold things together, and to prove it, he frees her navel from her body and makes it come alive in his hand, his sexual object.

But these fantastical aspects seem like ersatz Murakami. They're self- consciously literary, making readers more aware of the writer than the story and distancing them from the living, breathing world she's so stunningly created.

But these are quibbles about a collection that's as strong and as surprising as lasting happiness would be to any of its remarkable characters.